The Choir Invisible
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James Lane Allen >> The Choir Invisible
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The two were walking toward a rough bench placed under a tree inside the
picket fence. Amy had thrown her arm around Mrs. Falconer's waist.
"But you went to the ball," said the elder woman. "You were not idle there,
I imagine. And a ball is good for a great deal. One ought to accomplish more
there than in a garden. Besides, you went with John Gray, and he is never
idle. Did--he--accomplish--nothing?""Indeed, he was not idle!" exclaimed Amy
with a jubilant laugh. "Indeed he did accomplish something--more than he
ever did in his life before!"
Mrs. Falconer made no rejoinder; she was too poignantly saying to herself:
"Ah! if it is too late, what will become of him? "
The bench was short. Instinctively they seated themselves as far apart as
possible; and they turned their faces outward across the garden, not toward
each other as they had been used when sitting thus.
The one was nineteen--the tulip: with springlike charm but perfectly hollow
and ready to be filled by east wind or west wind, north wind or south wind,
according as each blew last and hardest; the other thirty-six--the rose: in
its midsummer splendour with fold upon fold of delicate symmetric
structures, making a masterpiece.
"Aunt Jessica," Amy began to say drily, as though this were to be her last
concession to a relationship now about to end, "I might as well tell you
everything that has happened, just as I've been used to doing since I was a
child--when I've done anything wrong."
She gave a faithful story of the carrying off of her party dress, which of
course had been missed and accounted for, the losing of it and the breaking
of her engagement with John; the return of it and her going to the ball with
Joseph. This brought her mind to the scenes of the night, and she abandoned
herself momentarily to the delight of reviving them.
"Ah! if you had been there, Aunt Jessica! If they had seen you in a ball
dress as I've seen you without one: those shoulders! those arms! that skin!
You would have been a swan among the rough-necked, red-necked turkeys," and
Amy glanced a little enviously at a neck that rose out of the plain dress as
though turned by a sculptor.
The sincere little compliment beat on Mrs. Falconer's ear like a wave upon a
stone.
"But if you did not go with John Gray, you danced with him, you talked with
him?"
"No," replied Amy, quickly growing grave, "I didn't dance with him. But we
talked yes--not much; it was a little too serious for many words," and she
sank into a mysterious silence, seeming even to forget herself in some new
recess of happiness.
Mrs. Falconer was watching her.
"Ah!" she murmured to herself. "It is too late! too late!" She passed her
fingers slowly across her brow with a feeling that life had turned ashen,
cold, barren."How is Kitty?" she asked quickly.
"Well--as always; and stupid."
"She is always kind and good, isn't she? and faithful."
"Kindness is not always interesting, unfortunately; and goodness is
dreadful, and her faithfulness bores me to death."
"At least, she was your hostess, Amy." "I lent her my silk stockings or
she'd have had to wear cotton ones," exclaimed Amy, laughing. "We're even."
"If you were merely paying for a lodging, you should have gone to the inn."
"There was nobody at the tavern who could wear my silk stockings; and I had
spent all my money."
"Don't you expect Kitty to return your visit?
"I certainly do-- more's the pity. She has such big feet!" Amy put out her
toe and studied it with vixenish satisfaction.
"Aunt Jessica," she observed at length, looking round at her aunt. "You
have to work too hard. And I have always been such a care to you. Wouldn't
you like to get rid of me?"
Mrs. Falconer leaned quickly, imploringly, toward her.
"Is that a threat, Amy?"
Amy waited half a minute and then began with a composure that was tinged
with condescension:
"You have had so much trouble in your life, Aunt Jessica; so much sorrow."
Mrs. Falconer started and turned upon her niece her eyes that were always
exquisite with refinement.
"Amy, have I ever spoken to you of the troubles of my life?" The reproof was
majestic in dignity and gentleness.
"You have not."
"Then will you never speak of them to me never again--while you live!"
Amy began again with a dry practical voice, which had in it the sting of
revenge; her aunt's rebuke had nettled her.
"At least, I have always been a trouble to you. You sew for me, cook for me,
make the garden for me, spin and weave for me, and worry about me. Uncle has
to work for me and support me."
The turn of the conversation away from herself brought such relief that Mrs.
Falconer replied even warmly.
"You have been a great pleasure to him and to me! The little I have done,
you have repaid a thousand fold. Think of us at night without you! Your
uncle on one side of the fireplace--me on the other, and you away! Think of
us at the table--him at one end, me at the other, and you away! Think of me
alone in the house all day, while he is in the fields! Child, I have
depended on you--more than you will ever understand!" she added to herself.
"Aunt Jessica," observed Amy with the air of making a fine calculation,
"perhaps uncle would think more of you if I were not in the house."
"Amy!"
"Perhaps you would think more of him!"
"Amy!"
"Perhaps if neither of you had me to depend on, you might depend more on
each other and be happier."
"You speak to me in this way--on a subject like this! You'd better go!"
"Aunt Jessica," replied Amy, never budging, "the time has been when I would
have done so. But it is too late now for you ever to tell me to leave your
presence. I am a woman! If I had not been, I shouldn't have said what I just
have."
Mrs. Falconer looked at her in silence. This rare gentlewoman had too
profound a knowledge of the human heart not to realize that she was
completely vanquished. For where in this world is not refinement instantly
beaten by coarseness, gentleness by rudeness, all delicacy by all that is
indelicate? What can the finest consideration avail against no
consideration? the sweetest forbearance against intrusiveness? the beak of
the dove against the beak of the hawk? And yet all these may have their
victory; for when the finer and the baser metal are forced to struggle with
each other in the same field, the finer may always leave it.
With unruffled dignity and with a voice that Amy had never heard--a voice
that brought the blood rushing into her cheeks--Mrs. Falconer replied:"Yes;
it is true: you are a woman. This is the first day that you have ever made
me feel this. For I have always known that as soon as you became one, you
would begin to speak to me as you have spoken. I shall never again request
you to leave my presence: when it becomes unavoidable, I shall leave yours."
She rose and was moving away. Amy started up and caught her.
"Aunt Jessica, I've something to tell you!" she cried, her face dyed scarlet
with the sting.
Mrs. Falconer released herself gently and returned to her seat.
"You know what I mean by what I said?" inquired Amy, still confused but
regaining self command rapidly.
"I believe I know: you are engaged to be married."
The words were very faint: they would have reached the subtlest ear with the
suggestiveness of a light dreary wind blowing over a desolation.
"Yes; I am engaged to be married."
Amy affirmed it with a definite stress.
"It is this that has made you a woman?
"It is this that has made me a woman."
After the silence of a moment Mrs. Falconer inquired:
"You do not expect to ask my consent--my advice?"
"I certainly do not expect to ask your consent--your advice."
Amy was taking her revenge now--and she always took it as soon as possible.
"Nor your uncle's?"
"Nor my uncle's."
After another, longer silence:
"Do you care to tell me how long this engagement has lasted?"
"Certainly!--Since last night."
"Thank you for telling me that. I think I must go back to my work now."
She walked slowly away. Amy sat still, twirling her bonnet strings and
smiling to herself.
This outburst of her new dignity--this initial assertion of her
womanhood--had come almost as unexpectedly to herself as to her aunt. She
had scarcely known it was in herself to do such a thing. Certain
restrictions had been chafing her for a long time: she had not dreamed that
they could so readily be set aside, that she had only to stamp her foot
violently down on another foot and the other foot would be jerked out of the
way. In the flush of elation, she thought of what had just taken place as
her Declaration of Independence. She kept on celebrating it in a sort of
intoxication at her own audacity:
"I have thrown off the yoke of the Old Dynasty! Glory for the thirteen
colonies! A Revolution in half an hour! I'm the mother of a new country!
Washington, salute me!"
Then, with perhaps somewhat the feeling of a pullet that has whipped a hen
in a barnyard and that after an interval will run all the way across the
barnyard to attack again and see whether the victory is complete, she rose
and went across the garden, bent on trying the virtue of a final peck.
"But you haven't congratulated me, Aunt Jessica! You have turned your back
on the bride elect--you with all your fine manners! She presents herself
once more to your notice the future Mrs. Joseph Holden, Junior, to be
married one month from last night!" And unexpectedly standing in front of
Mrs. Falconer, Amy made one of her low bows which she had practised in the
minuet. But catching the sight of the face of her aunt, she cried
remorsefully:
"Oh, I have been so rude to you, Aunt Jessica! Forgive me!" There was
something of the new sense of womanhood in her voice and of the sisterhood
in suffering which womanhood alone can bring.
But Mrs. Falconer had not heard Amy's last exclamation.
"What do you mean?" she asked with quick tremulous eagerness. She had
regained her firmness of demeanour, which alone should have turned back any
expression of sympathy before it could have been offered.
"That I am to become Mrs. Joseph Holden--a month from last night," repeated
Amy bewitchingly.
"You are serious?"
"I am serious!"
Mrs. Falconer did not take Amy's word: she searched her face and eyes with
one swift scrutiny that was like a merciless white flame of truth, scorching
away all sham, all play, all unreality. Then she dropped her head quickly,
so that her own face remained hidden, and silently plied her work. But how
the very earth about the rake, how the little roots and clods, seemed to
come to life and leap joyously into the air! All at once she dropped
everything and came over and took Amy's hand and kissed her cheek. Her
lovely eyes were glowing; her face looked as though it had upon it the rosy
shadow of the peach trees not far away.
"I do congratulate you," she said sweetly, but with the reserve which Amy's
accession to womanhood and the entire conversation of the morning made an
unalterable barrier to her. "You have not needed advice: you have chosen
wisely. You shall have a beautiful wedding. I will make your dress myself.
The like of it will never have been seen in the wilderness. You shall have
all the finest linen in the weaving-room. Only a month! How shall we ever
get ready!--if we stand idling here! Oh, the work, the work!" she cried and
turned to hers with a dismissing smile--unable to trust herself to say more.
"And I must go and take the things out of my bundle," cried Amy, catching
the contagion of all this and bounding away to the house. Some five minutes
later Mrs. Falconer glanced at the sun: it was eleven o'clock--time to be
getting dinner.
When she reached her room, Amy was standing beside the bed, engaged in
lifting out of the bundle the finery now so redolent of the ball.
"Aunt Jessica," she remarked carelessly, without looking round, "I forgot to
tell you that John Gray had a fight with a panther in his schoolroom this
morning," and she gave several gossamer-like touches to the white lace
tucker.
Mrs. Falconer had seated herself in a chair to rest. She had taken off her
bonnet, and her fingers were unconsciously busy with the lustrous edges of
her heavy hair. At Amy's words her hands fell to her lap. But she had long
ago learned the value of silence and self-control when she was most deeply
moved: Amy had already surprised her once that morning.
"The panther bit him in the shoulder close to the neck," continued Amy,
folding the tucker away and lifting out the blue silk coat. "They were on
the floor of the school-house in the last struggle when Erskine got there.
He had gone for Phoebe Lovejoy's cows, because it was raining and she
couldn't go herself; and he heard John as he was passing. He said his voice
sounded like the bellow of a dying bull."
"Is he much hurt? Where is he? Did you go to see him? ho dressed his wound?
Who is with him?"
"They carried him home," said Amy, turning round to the light and pressing
the beautiful silk coat in against her figure with little kicks at the
skirt. "No; I didn't go; Joseph came round and told me. He didn't think the
wound was very dangerous--necessarily. One of his hands was terribly
clawed."
"A panther? In town? In his schoolroom?"--
"You know Erskine keeps a pet panther. I heard him tell Mrs. Poythress it
was a female," said Amy with an apologetic icy, knowing little laugh. "And
he said this one had been prowling about in the edge of the canebrakes for
several days. He had been trying to get a shot at it. He says it was nearly
starved: that was why it wanted to eat John whole before breakfast."
Amy turned back to the bed and shook out delicately the white muslin
dress--the dress that John had hung on the wall of his cabin--that had wound
itself around his figure so clingingly.
There was silence in the room. Amy had now reached the silk stockings; and
taking up one, she blew down into it and quickly peeped over the side, to
see whether it would fill out to life-size--with a mischievous wink.
"I am going to him at once."
Amy looked up in amazement.
"But, Aunt Jessica," she observed reproachfully; "who will get uncle's
dinner? You know I can't."
"Tell your uncle what has happened as soon as he comes."
She had risen and was making some rapid preparations.
"I want my dinner," said Amy ruefully, seating herself on the edge of the
bed and watching her aunt with disapproval.
"You can't go now!" she exclaimed. "Uncle has the horses in the field."
Mrs. Falconer turned to her with simple earnestness.
"I hoped you would lend me your horse?"
"But he is tired; and beside I want to use him this afternoon: Kitty and I
are going visiting."
"Tell your uncle when he comes in," said Mrs. Falconer, turning in the
doorway a minute later, and speaking rapidly to her niece, but without the
least reproach, "tell your uncle that his friend is badly hurt. Tell him
that we do not know how badly. Tell him that I have gone to find out and to
do anything for him that I can. Tell him to follow me at once. He will
find me at his bedside. I am sorry about the dinner."
XII
SEVERAL days had slipped by.
At John's request they had moved his bed across the doorway of his cabin;
and stretched there, he could see the sun spring every morning out the
dimpled emerald ocean of the wilderness; and the moon follow at night,
silvering the soft ripples of the multitudinous leaves lapping the shores of
silence: days when the inner noises of life sounded like storms; nights when
everything within him lay as still as memory.
His wounds had behaved well from the out-set. When he had put forth all his
frenzied despairing strength to throttle the cougar, it had let go its hold
only to sink its fangs more deeply into his flesh, thus increasing the
laceration; and there was also much laceration of the hand. But the rich
blood flowing in him was the purest; and among a people who for a quarter of
a century had been used to the treatment of wounds, there prevailed a rough
but genuine skill that stood him in good stead. To these hardy fighting
folk, as to him, it was a scratch and he would have liked to go on with his
teaching. Warned of the danger of inflammation, however, he took to his bed;
and according to our own nervous standards which seem to have intensified
pain for us beyond the comprehension of our forefathers, he was sick and a
great sufferer.
Those long cool, sweet, brilliant days! Those long still, lonely, silvery
nights! His cabin stood near the crest of the hill that ran along the
southern edge of the settlement; and propped on his bed, he could look down
into the wide valley--into the town. The frame of his door became the frame
of many a living picture. Under a big shady tree at the creek-side, he could
see some of his children playing or fishing: their shouts and laughter were
borne to his ear; he could recognize their shrill voices--those always
masterful voices of boys at their games. Sometimes these little figures were
framed timidly just outside the door--the girls with small wilted posies,
the boys with inquiries. But there was no disguising the dread they all felt
that he might soon be well: he had felt himself once; he did not blame them.
Wee Jennie even came up with her slate one day and asked him to set her a
sum in multiplication; he did so; but he knew that she would rub it out as
soon as she could get out of sight, and he laughed quietly to himself at
this tiny casuist, who was trying so hard to deceive them both.
Two or three times, now out in the sunlight, now under the shadow of the
trees, he saw an old white horse go slowly along the distant road; and a
pink skirt and a huge white bonnet--two or three times; but he watched for
it a thousand times till his eyes grew weary.
One day Erskine brought the skin of the panther which he was preparing for
him, to take the place of the old one under his table. He brought his rifle
along also,--his "Betsy," as he always called it; which, however, he
declared was bewitched just now; and for a while John watched him curiously
as he nailed a target on a tree in front of John's door, drew on it the face
of the person whom he charged with having bewitched his gun, and then,
standing back, shot it with a silver bullet; after which, the spell being
now undone, he dug the bullet out of the tree again and went off to hunt
with confidence in his luck.
And then the making of history was going on under his eyes down there in the
town, and many a thoughtful hour he studied that. The mere procession of
figures across his field of vision symbolized the march of destiny, the
onward sweep of the race, the winning of the continent. Now the barbaric
paint and plumes of some proud Indian, peaceably come to trade in pelts but
really to note the changes that had taken place in his great hunting ground,
loved and ranged of old beyond all others: this figure was the Past--the
old, old Past. Next, the picturesque, rugged outlines of some backwoods
rifleman, who with his fellows had dislodged and pushed the Indian westward:
this figure was the Present--the short-lived Present. Lastly, dislodging
this figure in turn and already pushing him westward as he had driven the
Indian, a third type of historic man, the fixed settler, the land-loving,
house-building, wife-bringing, child-getting, stock-breeding yeoman of the
new field and pasture: this was the figure of the endless Future. The
retreating wave of Indian life, the thin restless wave of frontier life, the
on-coming, all-burying wave of civilized life--he seemed to feel close to
him the mighty movements of the three. His own affair, the attack of the
panther, the last encounter between the cabin and the jungle looked to him
as typical of the conquest; and that he should have come out of the struggle
alive, and have owed his life to the young Indian fighter and hunter who had
sprung between him and the incarnate terror of the wilderness, affected his
imagination as an epitome of the whole winning of the West.
One morning while the earth was still fresh with dew, the great Boone came
to inquire for him, and before he left, drew from the pocket of his hunting
shirt a well-worn little volume.
"It has been my friend many a night," he said. "I have read it by many a
camp-fire. I had it in my pocket when I stood on the top of Indian Old
Fields and saw the blue grass lands for the first time. And when we
encamped on the creek there, I named it Lulbegrud in honour of my book. You
can read it while you have nothing else to do;" and he astounded John by
leaving in his hand Swift's story of adventures in new worlds.
He had many other visitors: the Governor, Mr. Bradford, General Wilkinson,
the leaders in the French movement, all of whom were solicitous for his
welfare as a man, but also as their chosen emissary to the Jacobin Club of
Philadelphia. In truth it seemed to him that everyone in the town came
sooner or later, to take a turn at his bedside or wish him well.
Except four persons: Amy did not come; nor Joseph, with whom he had
quarrelled and with whom he meant to settle his difference as soon as he
could get about; nor O'Bannon, whose practical joke had indirectly led to
the whole trouble; nor Peter, who toiled on at his forge with his wounded
vanity.
Betrothals were not kept secret in those days and engagements were short.
But as he was sick and suffering, some of those who visited him forbore to
mention her name, much less to speak of the preparations now going forward
for her marriage with Joseph. Others, indeed, did begin to talk of her and
to pry; but he changed the subject quickly.
And so he lay there with the old battle going on in his thoughts, never
knowing that she had promised to become the wife of another: fighting it all
over in his foolish, iron-minded way: some days hardening and saying he
would never look her in the face again; other days softening and resolving
to seek her out as soon as he grew well enough and learn whether the fault
of all this quarrel lay with him or wherein lay the truth: yet in all his
moods sore beset with doubts of her sincerity and at all times passing sore
over his defeat--defeat that always went so hard with him.
Meantime one person was pondering his case with a solicitude that he wist
not of: the Reverend James Moore, the flute-playing Episcopal parson of the
town, within whose flock this marriage was to take place and who may have
regarded Amy as one of his most frisky wayward fleeces. Perhaps indeed as
not wearing a white spiritual fleece at all but as dyed a sort of
merino-brown in the matter of righteousness.
He had long been fond of John--they both being pure-minded men, religious,
bookish, and bachelors; but their friendship caused one to think of the pine
and the palm: for the parson, with his cold bleak face, palish straight hair
put back behind white ears, and frozen smile, appeared always to be
inhabiting the arctic regions of life while John, though rooted in a
tropical soil of many passions, strove always to bear himself in character
like a palm, up-right, clean-cut; having no low or drooping branches; and
putting forth all the foliage and blossoms of the mind at the very summit of
his powers.
The parson and the school-master had often walked out to the Falconers'
together in the days when John imagined his suit to be faring prosperously;
and from Amy's conduct, and his too slight knowledge of the sex, this arctic
explorer had long since adjusted his frosted faculties to the notion that
she expected to become John's wife. He was sorry; it sent an extra chill
through the icebergs of his imagination; but perhaps he gathered comforting
warmth from the hope that some of John's whiteness would fall upon her and
that thus from being a blackish lambkin she would at least eventually turn
into a light-gray ewe.
When the tidings reached his far-inward ear that she was to marry Joseph
instead of his friend, a general thaw set in over the entire landscape of
his nature: it was like spring along the southern fringes of Greenland.
The error must not be inculcated here that the parson had no passions: he
had three-ruling ones: a passion for music, a passion for metaphysics, and a
passion for satirizing the other sex.
Dropping in one afternoon and glancing with delicate indirection at John's
short shelf of books, he inquired whether he had finished with his Paley.
John said he had and the parson took it down to bear away with him. Laying
it across his stony knees as he sat down and piling his white hands on it,
"Do you believe Paley?" he asked, turning upon John a pair of the most
beautiful eyes, which looked a little like moss agates.
"I believe St. Paul," replied John, turning his own eyes fondly on his open
Testament.
"Do you believe Paley?" insisted the parson, who would always have his
questions answered directly.
"There's a good deal of Paley: what do you mean?" said John, laughing
evasively.
"I mean his ground idea-the corner stone of his doctrine -his pou sto. I
mean do you believe that we can infer the existence and character of God
from any evidences of design that we see in the universe "
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